The must-read stories and debate in health policy and leadership.

It was revealed ahead of time that Jeremy Hunt would be using his first Budget to make some changes to pension taxes, but how far he went with it was still a bit of a surprise.

Instead of raising the lifetime allowance – as was widely expected – the chancellor scrapped it entirely. The allowance – which limits the amount a person can pay into their pension during their lifetime before incurring tax – has been blamed for encouraging consultants to cut their hours or leave the NHS entirely, taking their years of experience and ability to mentor the next generation of doctors with them.

Mr Hunt also used his Budget to raise the annual allowance – the amount somebody can pay into their pension each year before incurring tax – from £40,000 to £60,000. Like its lifetime counterpart, the annual allowance had become infamous for disincentivising clinicians from taking on extra shifts.

The changes were welcomed, particularly by the British Medical Association, which has been lobbying the government on the issue for years. But it won’t come cheap. Budget documents revealed these two changes will cost the Treasury more than £1bn between them annually by 2025.

Hiring spree

A newly stood up procurement service combining buying operations across multiple trusts in the north west of the capital is hiring a whole raft of new senior managers. They will help it reorientate its approach to procurement from a transactional one towards something more strategic, focused on category management. All of this in pursuit of £43m savings across five years.

This new procurement service has not been given any new money to do this, it is repurposing its resources to increase its capacity for category management and contract management.

It has eschewed outsourcing this resource, instead investing in its own management cadre to help it break out of the annual cycle of cost improvement programmes, to look to multi-year – up to 10-year – planning cycles for procurement.

Meanwhile, it is ironing out variation in the capacity of procurement teams in the individual trusts on the patch, and other variations such as different trusts using multiple and different procurement IT systems.

Also on hsj.co.uk today

In The Download, Nick Carding explains how one ICS is making great gains in the use of technology to manage waiting lists, and in news we report that a chief executive has apologised after a survey of his trust’s staff from minority ethnic backgrounds found many had been subjected to racist behaviour by colleagues.